The technique that’s revolutionizing aquatic science http://www.hcn.org/articles/trout-rivers-dna-science-research-invasive
Looking for brook trout? Try environmental DNA.Back in 2009, I passed a memorable summer in Yellowstone, helping the National Park Service exterminate the alien trout that past generations of biologists and anglers, in their finite wisdom, had carelessly introduced. One week, in an effort to purge the park’s northeast corner of invasive brook trout, we used backpack shockers: ungainly apparatuses that zapped streams with electric current, stunning nearby fish into submission so that we could net and kill the interloping brookies.

It was hard work, plagued by uncertainty and inefficiency. We once waded up a steep tributary for hours, fruitlessly waving our electrodes beneath logjams and waterfalls, certain that the stream was uncontaminated — only to shock an intrepid, lonely brook trout at the headwaters. Our sweat-soaked shoulders slumped. A day of back-breaking work to find a single fish? There had to be a better way.

The author holds up a non-native brook trout, plucked from a lake in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Elise Rose.

Now, I’m happy to report, such a way exists: environmental DNA, or eDNA. The scientific technique allows researchers to sample water or soil for minute traces of animal DNA — morsels of shed skin, fecal matter or reproductive material — to verify the presence of their target critter. Have brook trout or other invasives infiltrated a watershed? Is the cryptic Idaho giant salamander hiding in a mountain creek? Just grab a few water samples and run some polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) — a method for amplifying DNA that’s used in everything from forensics to diagnosing hereditary disease — and voila, you’ve got your answer. During my time in Yellowstone, eDNA could have saved us hours, even days, of arduous searching.

No wonder, then, that scientists around the West are spreading the eDNA gospel. Among the converts is Matthew Laramie, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist who recently employed the technique to find summer chinook salmon in northern Washington's Methow and Okanagan basins. The fish head upriver in spring, when melt-swollen creeks make traditional sampling methods like snorkeling or electrofishing impractical. By contrast, says Laramie, using eDNA barely requires getting out of the car: “A single person could sample the whole Okanagan Basin in a day or two.”

More important than convenience, of course, is accuracy. Fortunately, eDNA passes that test. In streams where Laramie knew chinook were present, he generally found their DNA; in streams that the fish couldn’t access, he didn’t. Now that the test has been proven effective on chinook, says Laramie, it can be used to track the salmon restoration efforts of the Colville Confederated Tribes, which plan to reintroduce spring chinook into the Okanagan within the year.

eDNA is also being employed to combat those pesky brook trout, an eastern species that have displaced bull trout, a threatened native cousin, in many Western streams. Tracking the fishes’ relative distributions may help researchers like Taylor Wilcox, a PhD student at the University of Montana, understand exactly what happens when the invader enters a system — especially whether bull trout can survive by fleeing to connected streams elsewhere in the watershed. Such a vast study is tailor-made for environmental DNA. “With eDNA, you can have really high detection probability over very large scales, and the cost of sampling is lower than doing backpack electrofishing,” Wilcox says. Indeed, he and collaborators have picked up traces of brook trout genetic material in situations where backpack electroshocking had stunned nary a fish.

Still, eDNA remains immature in many ways. The technique has only been in widespread use for a few years, and there are important questions it can’t yet reliably answer. How many fish — or frogs, or salamanders — live in a stream? Are they old or young, healthy or sick? Though traces of Asian carp DNA have led some scientists to suspect that the infamous invader has finally reached the Great Lakes, others claim the samples could have come from bird droppings or boats. Distinguishing the DNA of close relatives like brook and bull trout, or coho and chinook salmon, is also challenging. Scooping up water samples might be easy, but creating sufficiently sensitive PCR assays, claims Laramie, "is where the hard work of this method comes in."

Nonetheless, eDNA is already changing the face of aquatic science and conservation — and as methods improve, its role will only expand. “There are still so many unknowns,” Laramie says with relish. “It’s a field that’s just ripe for research.”

]]>No publisherFishMontanaNational Park ServiceNew ResearchRivers & LakesWildlife2015/02/16 22:10:00 GMT-7ArticleMy kind of town: Livingston, Montanahttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.3/my-kind-of-town-livingston-montana
An essay on returning home to the West, after years abroad.

Livingston, Montana, on the Fourth of July.

Jake Luttinger

When the preacher said doctrine wouldn’t allow my sister to join the Girl Scouts, he learned something about my mother, who turned around, shut the door and just walked away. Every time I walk past that church, I remember why I so rarely tried to tell my mother what to do.

A busy supermarket stands just up the street. There used to be a root beer stand there, and the thought of it churns memories of my grandmother, generally a soft touch for a frosty mug.

Around the corner is the tiny house Mom rented when we first moved into town, after her divorce, right across the street from the school where they told her women teachers weren’t worth as much as men. That policy turned her into a lifelong union member. Like I said, there wasn’t much point in trying to tell her no.

On the other end of town, I often pass the house where I got my –– astonishing –– first real kiss. The taste of lips and the texture of tongue can sound pretty sour to the early adolescent mind, but Debby Sanders converted me.

When John Lennon died a few years later, I was sitting in a house on the corner of F and Geyser, watching TV with the sound off and the stereo turned up. It took a couple minutes for the reality to soak through the fog.

These are the kind of ghosts I find on my daily walks around Livingston, Montana, my hometown.

For a place with only about 7,000 people, Livingston is pretty well known. Celebrities hang around and the scenery astounds. Three mountain ranges bulk up here and millions of tourists pass through, usually on their way to Yellowstone Park, just up the road. The Yellowstone River shoulders by, mostly a delight and sometimes a menace but always a marvel, untamed in spite of us. We’ve got wildlife all over the place and we have our famous wind, with gusts that roll semi trailers and motor homes, and once even a train, out by the truck stop. Serious crime is rare, but we live in the world: In 2011, two sheriff’s deputies killed a man who had shot and wounded a woman multiple times.

A Google dump could tell you most of this. But it can’t tell you who we are. That’s what the ghosts are for, if you listen to them.

I’ve spent most of my life here, so I see these ghosts a lot. They don’t pull at me, or make me particularly sad or happy. They just exist, like gravity, issuing reminders and providing weight.

It wasn’t always like this. They used to scare the bejeebers out of me.

A generation ago, I returned to Livingston after a long stint of foreign adventures –– the swarm of Asian cities, body-surfing in New Zealand, learning that a chicken’s monetary value soars if you run it over with a motorcycle.

The concept of coming home started to percolate in Seoul, Korea, on a sunny afternoon when a little bird flitted over my head, and I hit the deck. There had been riots and I thought somebody was aiming a stone at me. Slogging through tear gas makes a vivid memory, but what really struck me, after I regained my feet, was the rarity of birds in that city.

Back home, the tables turned and the stories sought me, popping up everywhere. I didn’t know that familiarity could frighten so.

It took a while to come home for good, partly because when I got here, the ghosts rattled me, made my feet itch to leave again. They were everywhere, peeking around corners, lifting a curtain to watch me pass, telling their stories. Mrs. Working was a crabby woman, impossible­ to satisfy, while her neighbor, Mr. Hokanson, could always spare a minute for a kid. A giant boy named Phillip sat next to me in second grade; he couldn’t speak a word, but a shared crayon always made him smile. (He liked the red ones.) Leo Schaeffer had 11 kids of his own but loved engaging in apple fights with the neighborhood hooligans. Willie Moffett, handsome and impish, joined the Marine Corps, and I never saw him again. Perry Herbst disappeared, too. By the time Kenny Fleming died, he didn’t add much weight at all to the first coffin I ever carried. I have no idea what happened to Debby Sanders, she of that first kiss.

I thought the best stories lay in unknown and exotic places, so that’s where I sought them. Back home, the tables turned and the stories sought me, popping up everywhere. I didn’t know that familiarity could frighten so.

It took a while, but I learned to appreciate the stories. They were part of me. Midge Taylor’s good advice at her cluttered table still provides a flicker of warmth when I pass her house. Mickey Livermore’s giant fist taught me to watch my mouth. The bowling alley where I played pinball is now a mental health center.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m fully capable of ignoring these ghosts, especially if I’m in a hurry or preoccupied. Most people have similar memories, I suspect. But most people don’t live in the town where they grew up, so their ghosts suffer the erosion of time and distance.

My ghosts don’t seem to fade, especially since I’ve been walking more, trying to wrestle back the middle-aged flab. They’ve taught me to see their stories as a yardstick, a measurement of how things change.

On M Street, I remember how the kids ostracized Dolly McNeill, and I wonder if modern schools could have nipped that in the bud. On Yellowstone Street, I recall the crush I had on Jill Glenn, the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Up by Winans School, I remember the satisfaction I felt when Benjie Schweniger knocked the snot out of the worst bully in junior high school. On Eighth Street, I remember the woman they called Dirty Mary, who raided garbage cans for food and suffered endless taunts. We didn’t have a mental health center then, or a food bank either, though we probably needed both.

On some blocks, I can name somebody who lived in every house at some point in time. But I often can’t name the people who live there now. I wonder: Do they know the stories of their homes?

A great scary, hairy man used to drink beer on his porch on the corner of Eighth and Clark streets, wearing a T-shirt and scowling at the summer hubbub. My friend Dave Eaton lives there now and laughs at that story. But what about the house on F Street where a man impregnated his wife’s 12-year-old daughter, with his wife’s full cooperation? Somebody else lives there now. The yard is neat, the dog is friendly, a tricycle is stowed on the porch and the walks are shoveled. I’m not about to go knock on that door and spill those ­particular beans.

But the ghosts know. They’ve watched things change. They’ve seen our cruelty and our kindness. They’ve watched us bicker and then come together when the river floods or a house burns or cancer strikes. They’ve watched schools close and new banks open. Livingston has more wealthy people now and fewer children, and I wonder if the ghosts realize there’s something off-kilter there.

Most of the railroad jobs are gone, but there’s a dozen art galleries. The neighborhood grocery stores closed up ages ago, but we have better food now. A bin of avocados or a jar of kimchi no longer puzzles people, and tuna doesn’t have to come in a can. In many ways, I like my town better now. It’s more open-minded and more generous, I think. We’ve certainly become more cosmopolitan, with creative people from all over the world passing through or planting roots, living out stories that will be somebody else’s ghosts someday.

But I’m glad my own ghosts are still here, the old ones reminding me of people now gone, people who died or chased a dream or maybe just found a job somewhere else.

They’re OK, these ghosts. I’m used to them now. They can walk with me any time.

Scott McMillion is the editor of Montana Quarterly, where a version of this essay originally appeared.

]]>No publisherEssaysMontanaCommunitiesPeople & PlacesNot on homepage2015/02/16 03:10:00 GMT-7ArticleOil pipelines are going to keep breaking in rivershttp://www.hcn.org/articles/oil-pipelines-are-going-to-keep-breaking-in-rivers
On the second day of July in 2011, I walked down to my hay fields to see if the Yellowstone River had flooded its banks. It had -- but so had crude oil leaking from Exxon’s Silvertip Pipeline, which runs underneath the river upstream from my farm south of Billings, Montana.

That was the beginning of months of dealing with cleanup workers, water and soil testing, while my family suffered from chronic coughs and a lot of stress. In the end, it was determined that 1,500 barrels of oil had spilled into the river.

Three and a half years later, last month on Jan. 17, another oil pipeline broke under the Yellowstone River, 200 miles downstream from me and close to the eastern Montana town of Glendive. It is estimated that around 39,000 gallons spilled into the frozen river; we will probably see this number climb as time goes on.

The spill in Glendive happened despite the promises made by our politicians that oil pipelines would be made safer, and despite the passage of the Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act of 2011. Really, not much has changed.

Here’s how oil spills work. An oil pipeline breaks and the public is the last to know. You are told everything is under control. When you start to feel sick, you’re told not to worry -- there is no threat to public health. Getting answers always takes longer than it should. The state’s Department of Emergency Services seems incapable of dealing with the spill and directs all public questions to the oil company.

People from the Environmental Protection Agency arrive. They tell you that even though you drank some benzene, it’s not enough to hurt you. You trust them because they’re the EPA, or else you don’t trust them, because they’re the EPA.

Politicians take tours of the site, nod their heads solemnly and pose for photos so they can show how much they care. The oil spill will get press coverage but the amount of attention will correspond with the location of the spill and the political importance of the residents affected. In Glendive’s case, it helps that the Yellowstone River is an iconic river in Montana, but let’s be honest here: Glendive is a small town and it’s in eastern Montana, two strikes against it.

The company lowballs the estimate of the amount of oil spilled in the beginning, and then that amount gradually increases as time goes on and fewer people are paying attention. In a river oil spill, once the oil is out, it is out. The company’s booms and white napkins do a little, but not enough. Most of the oil that is in the river is in the river for good.

Here are some of the hard-earned lessons that landowners like me learned about pipeline oil spills:

Being exposed to oil can make you sick. That may seem obvious, but citizens are usually told that public health is not threatened. So when people do get sick, many don’t go to the hospital. I finally went to the emergency room with acute hydrocarbon exposure. (If people do not seek treatment, there is no record of the public health impacts from oil spills, which can be severe.)

You have to be your own advocate. You need to do research, go to public meetings and ask tough questions. It can be hard to confront people, and that is especially true in smaller communities. It is your responsibility to advocate for your community and to be a voice for the people who can’t, or won’t, speak out.

Don’t assume that the people running the cleanup operations -- either from the government or the oil company -- know what they are doing. In 2011, I was told by various people who were part of the cleanup that oil was organic so it was safe for my livestock to eat, that oil was essentially a fertilizer, and that our grass would come back greener than ever. Our public health agency even sent out a press release that said being exposed to oil was like being sprayed by a skunk.

Both of the recent oil spills in the Yellowstone River were preventable. Yet oil spills will keep happening to communities all over the West until politicians on both sides of the aisle decide to take pipeline safety seriously and not just pay lip service to the changes needed in oversight and regulation of oil companies.

Until then, we’re on our own.

Alexis Bonogofsky, a fourth-generation Montanan, is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. She works for the National Wildlife Federation in Billings, Montana, and writes a blog www.eastofbillings.com.

]]>No publisherWriters on the RangeOpinionMontana2015/02/05 02:10:00 GMT-7ArticlePerseverance pays off for the Rocky Mountain Fronthttp://www.hcn.org/articles/perseverance-pays-off-for-the-rocky-mountain-front
A 37-year crusade ends in new protectionsOn the morning of Dec. 18, Gene Sentz stood in a cow pasture on the Crary Ranch near Choteau, Montana. To the west was the Rocky Mountain Front, its bare foothills of short-grass prairie rising abruptly into snow-capped peaks and rolling limestone reefs. Dressed in blue jeans and a canvas jacket, he listened to his friend Dusty Crary talk to a clutch of reporters, who were huddled with about 30 other Montanans against a cold wind.

Sentz bowed his head so that only his bushy white beard showed beneath a wool hunting cap that had faded from red to pink over the years. Then the retired teacher and longtime horse-packer stepped to the front of the group to stand alongside Montana Democratic Sens. Jon Tester and John Walsh. The senators had worked with Montana Republican Rep. Steve Daines to pass the Heritage Act a few days earlier.

The bill protects 275,000 acres of national forest and Bureau of Land Management land that biologists consider to be among the top 1 percent of wildlife habitat in the country. And it designates the first new wilderness in Montana in 31 years, adding 67,000 acres to the Bob Marshall and Scapegoat wilderness areas. The bill also protects 208,000 acres in a conservation management area, which prevents the expansion of motorized use, prohibits new roads and protects horse, foot and cycling trails.

A modest man, Sentz began by saying, “Thank you,” in such a low voice that several reporters leaned in just to hear his words. “Everybody here has had a hand in this,” he added, “whether they’ve been involved almost four decades or four months.”

There is no doubt that Sentz belongs to the first of these two categories, having begun his crusade to protect the Front in 1977. His humble organization, Friends of the Rocky Mountain Front, started as a phone tree and newsletter, whose stamps -- hundreds of them –- were the volunteer group’s major expense.

Back in 1982, the Lewis and Clark National Forest had leased every acre of the Front for oil and gas development, and major companies were buying those acres up. The Friends rallied around a wilderness bill designed in part to protect the Front, but President Reagan vetoed the bill in 1988. Following this defeat, a larger coalition formed around the Friends, including the Montana Wilderness Association, The Wilderness Society and the Montana Wildlife Federation.

Lawsuits kept drillers at bay until 1997, when Forest Supervisor Gloria Flora suspended mineral leasing on a total of 356,000 acres. In 2006, Montana Sens. Max Baucus, D, and Conrad Burns, R, passed legislation making the suspension permanent. The coalition then began working on legislation that would freeze current management for the future. After countless kitchen table conversations, 10 public meetings and eight more years, the Heritage Act passed the House and the Senate with bipartisan support.

Gene Sentz was 37 when he started fighting for the Front; now he’s 74 and is beginning to show signs of age. Last year, while hiking on the Front, he had a heart attack.

“I got almost to the top of the ridge, and I knew what was going on,” he explained. “I had some aspirins in my pocket, and I immediately sat down. I thought to myself, ‘Well, this is a pretty nice spot. I can see all around and this is a good place to go.’ ”

After 20 minutes, though, he decided that he might make it. He walked out and was taken by Flight for Life to Great Falls that afternoon, where he had two stents installed the same day.

After the press conference ended, I asked Gene how he was feeling. “Well, I’ll tell ya,” he said in his usual slow-and-steady tone of voice. “The only thing that bothers me now is this here.” He rapped his knuckles on his right knee, which has been barking at him lately.

“But,” he continued, “my daughter, Sarah, had me on top of Old Man of the Hills just this summer, so I think I’m doing all right.”

Then he suddenly took several long strides to intercept Sen. Tester, leaving me to gaze north along the Front toward Old Man of the Hills, a mountain that rises 8,229 feet above the prairie like a ship’s prow breaking waves on an vast ocean. The Front, considered the backbone of the world by the Blackfeet people, continued north from there, beyond my line of sight.

Like Gene, it just never seems to quit.

Gabriel Furshong is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a conservationist in Missoula, Montana.

The tree in question is the whitebark pine, an iconic species that’s been devastated throughout the Northern Rockies by mountain pine beetles and a fungal disease called blister rust. We’re accustomed to thinking of fungi as a danger to biodiversity: In addition to pines, witness bats and frogs, imperiled by white-nose syndrome and chytrid, respectively. But Cripps, a mycologist at Montana State University, is captivated by the opposite story — a certain fungus may yet be what whitebark pine needs to survive.

Whitebark pines are listed as warranted but precluded from protection under the Endangered Species Act. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

That notion emerged from years of fieldwork in whitebark pine forests throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. There, Cripps noticed that the soil was rife with a particular fungal species: Suillus sibericus, aka Siberian slippery jack. Suillus sibericus is a mycorrhizal fungus, meaning that it forms close symbiotic relationships with the roots of plants. The fungus draws sugar from roots, and in turn pipes nutrients back to its host tree through an underground network of fine filaments. “Each root tip gets surrounded by the fungus, just like a little sock,” Cripps says.

Cripps wondered if mycorrhizal fungi could change the survival odds for whitebark pine seedlings grown in nurseries and planted for restoration. Cultivating whitebarks is an arduous process — among other complications, the seeds have to be exposed to elaborate temperature cycles in order to germinate — and not always successful. One graduate student who surveyed more than 100,000 whitebark seedlings planted in the region found that just 42 percent lived.

That low success rate is partly due to the fact that whitebark seedlings are often outcompeted by rival trees, like spruce and fir. Slippery jack offered a solution: While many other mycorrhizal fungi are “promiscuous” — they partner with more than one tree species — S. sibericus almost exclusively cohabitates with whitebark and its relatives. “We figured sibericus would give whitebark pine an advantage, without helping the tree species that are competitive with it,” Cripps says.

That’s when the hunt began. Cripps and a graduate student named Erin Lonergan foraged for slippery jack’s lemon curd-colored mushrooms in the mountains around Yellowstone and Canada’s Waterton Lakes National Park; back at MSU, they used a coffee grinder to mill the underside of the mushrooms, where spores reside, into a powder. Finally, Cripps diluted the powder with water and employed an inoculation gun — the kind you’d use to vaccinate cattle — to implant her spore concoction into the soil around whitebark seedlings growing in the Glacier National Park nursery.

In September 2010, volunteers planted about a thousand seedlings from the Glacier nursery at test sites across the border in Waterton. This summer, Cripps and Lonergan reported that, after three years, the fungal inoculation had enhanced survival by 11 percent. “Given how difficult it is to grow seedlings, even a small increase in survival is very important,” Cripps says.

Parks Canada agrees with her: They’ll be using slippery jack on future whitebark plantings in Waterton, Banff and Jasper National Parks. (Nurseries in the U.S. haven’t yet committed to the technique, but they’re interested.) Cripps still isn’t positive how slippery jack benefits pines, though she suspects it aids the tree by helping it take up nitrogen. Just as scientists are still coming to understand how certain trees die, they have a ways to go in figuring out why others live.

But for all the concern about whitebark survival, Cripps is equally worried about the other side of the symbiotic coin. “If you have a whitebark pine ghost forest where all the trees are just skeletons," she wonders, "how long can these specific fungi persist in the soil?”

Wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone in the 1990s, giving researchers the chance to study the predators’ effects on the ecosystem, such as providing food for scavengers, after a long absence.

Dan Hartman

Some come for the geysers and grizzlies, but I’ve traveled hundreds of miles to Yellowstone National Park simply to stand in the drainage of Elk Creek, stooped over a stunted willow bush. Tan branches, tinged with red, just reach my thighs, and narrow pale-green leaves blend into the wheat-like stalks of timothy grass and smooth brome filling this humdrum meadow.

Nearby, David Cooper, a Colorado State University ecologist, inspects one willow like a doctor examining a patient. The diagnosis isn’t good. “This plant has obviously got a lot of problems,” Cooper says. “It’s just stuck.” This willow could be 30 years old and should be 12 feet tall, but it looks as if I could uproot it with one swift jerk. It’s a clue to the mystery that drew me to the park: Have wolves saved Yellowstone?

National Geographic, Scientific American, countless newspaper articles, documentaries, even a TED talk, have all marveled at the transformation wrought by the re-introduction of wolves to Yellowstone in the mid-1990s. The story goes like this: After a 70-year absence, returning wolves put elk on the run, depleting their numbers and scattering the remainder. Freed from relentless browsing, the region bloomed with fresh vegetation, inviting songbirds, beaver and other animals. Wolves were bringing Eden back from the brink.

It’s a lovely tale, but researchers like Cooper warn that the reality is more complicated. For him and fellow Colorado State professor Tom Hobbs, Elk Creek is key to understanding north Yellowstone’s ecosystem, and to telling a truer story, one of an older, more vibrant landscape that may already be lost, perhaps irrevocably.

Cooper, who is stocky and has a trim white beard, has spent his career as a plant ecologist, tracing water and its role in Western landscapes from the Sonoran Desert to the Rocky Mountains. Hobbs, lanky and loquacious, specializes in mathematically modeling how large mammals shape ecosystems. In 2000, the duo came to Elk Creek, drawn by talk of intriguing changes rippling through the ecosystem as wolf packs grew. They wondered what was happening in the smaller streams that lace the area, particularly to the willows that are the linchpin to their health.

“It’s not like the wolves came in and everything has readjusted to normal,” Cooper says. “Some sites may recover more quickly, others may never recover.”

Much of north Yellowstone falls away from the park’s high central plateau in a series of broad valleys, steep canyons and rolling sagebrush hillsides. Its lower elevation and drier climate make it a winter haven for elk. In the wolves’ absence, plants like willow and aspen declined, as expanding elk herds browsed on them in winter.

On a hot summer day, there’s little sign of elk in the creek named after them. Cooper lets go of his stubby willow branch, strides down to the stream and points to a wall of dirt carved away by the water, revealing layers of fine-grained gray and brown sediment, the traces of vanished ponds. Less than a century ago, we would have been underwater. “This was a pond environment for thousands of years,” Cooper says. “This whole valley was just full of beaver dams.”

Researchers Tom Hobbs, left, and David Cooper examine a willow stunted by elk browsing in Yellowstone.

Warren Cornwall

In fact, in the early 1920s, a naturalist named Edward Warren spent two summers here, photographing and cataloguing beaver colonies near the Yellowstone River. On Elk Creek’s North Fork, Warren counted 17 dams, the largest a 350-foot-long bulwark worthy of a medieval castle. In all, he guessed there were more than 200 beaver in the streams he surveyed. Back then, the concern was that too many beaver, with too few predators, were devouring too many plants. Today, in those same places, there are no beavers at all.

Populations of the flat-tailed rodents naturally ebb and flow in a creek. Nature’s engineers, the beavers gnaw down aspen and willow, move on to other places when they’re gone, then return when new plants grow in the soft, moist soil created by the abandoned dams. As we walk downstream, Cooper and Hobbs explain that the loss of wolves appears to have short-circuited this natural cycle in places like Elk Creek. Exploding elk numbers destroyed the willow and aspen, driving the beaver away. Over time, the creek eroded into a steep-banked gully, lowering the water table. A wet meadow became a dry valley, inhospitable to plants like willow, even after wolves returned and elk numbers fell.

This became clear in experiments the two have run at Elk Creek and several other streams. They built dams in the creeks to simulate beaver and fenced off patches of willow to keep elk out. In most cases, the willows only rebounded when they were fenced off and grew near the dams, where the ground was moist. In other words, without the dams, it didn’t matter about the elk — or the wolves that might have chased them.

Cooper thinks Elk Creek and similar streams have undergone such profound changes that recovery might require the return of both the wolf and the beaver. But it’s not that simple, either. “Until there’s enough willow that the beavers can come back, it’s going to be stuck,” he says. “So the question is, what’s it going to take for the engineers to come back?”

For Doug Smith, the head of Yellowstone’s wolf reintroduction program and the park’s main beaver biologist, Elk Creek is a sobering reminder that some of the damage wrought in the wolves’ absence might never be repaired — that Eden may never fully return. “This has changed to a site that can’t go back,” he says later, when I take him to the creek. “There’s no water.”

But there is another story unfolding elsewhere, he says: Go to the West Fork of Blacktail Deer Creek.

If Elk Creek is Exhibit A for the wolf skeptics, Blacktail Deer Creek, just nine miles to the west, is a shining example for wolf champions. Slightly bigger than Elk Creek, it’s hidden in a forest of willows, which sway in the breeze like seaweed in the tide. Over the last 13 years, Robert Beschta, an Oregon State University hydrologist, and his colleague, ecologist William Ripple, have used this creek to document what they see as a wolf-driven revival of north Yellowstone.

Before the predator’s return, Blacktail Deer’s willows looked much like those in Elk Creek. But by 2003, a growth spurt had begun: The tallest willows were roughly six feet longer than in 1997. As these tallest plants grew, the number chomped by animals fell from 100 percent to 55 percent or less. In the last few years, beaver have begun making summer forays into the creek. “Come back in 15 years and ask the question, ‘Where are the beaver?’ and I bet you they’re going to be everywhere,” Beschta tells me.

I drive Cooper to Blacktail Deer Creek. We walk a mile up its West Fork, through sagebrush punctuated by fledgling aspen groves. This section of stream has witnessed some of the most dramatic growth. “If you’re wondering why the plants here look so different,” Cooper says, “we’re wondering that, too.”

Were these willows simply more resilient when the elk reigned, and therefore poised to rebound? Or was the ground here simply wetter? What lessons do this creek and Elk Creek hold for the broader region?

For Smith, the conclusion seems to hinge partly on where scientists decide to look. After two decades at the park, he’s convinced he sees real improvements in some larger streams and rivers. And he credits wolves for playing an important part. “Elk are key, but so are site characteristics,” he says. “You need both.”

Yet Yellowstone is a massive ecosystem, and we don’t know everything about it. Some of its watersheds could be blossoming out of sight, even as others languish, never to return. Yellowstone is recovering. And Yellowstone is stuck. There is more than one Yellowstone, and more than one story it can tell us.

]]>No publisherWildlifeMontanaWolvesU.S. Fish & Wildlife2014/12/08 04:00:00 GMT-7ArticleKilling wolves to protect cattle may backfirehttp://www.hcn.org/articles/killing-wolves-to-protect-cattle-may-backfire
A new study raises questions about how to handle livestock conflicts.In two decades of studying large carnivores, nature has never failed to surprise Rob Wielgus. For example, he and his student found in 2013 that cougar hunting does not reduce complaints about people running into cougars, or livestock attacks. Harvesting cougars actually increased complaints the following year. That research led to changes in how Washington manages the big cats; last year the state stopped using heavy cougar hunting to reduce conflicts.

This week, Wielgus, director of Washington State University’s Large Carnivore Conservation Lab, released his newest study with equally surprising results. “I analyzed it like 50 times, with different statisticians and layers and layers of peer review because the results are kind of astounding,” he says. The new paper challenges assumptions about how state wildlife agencies deal with problem wolves. It turns out that killing wolves that kill livestock may backfire in the long term. According to the study, lethal removal may actually increase the odds that wolves eat more cattle or sheep the following year.

Overall, wolves are doing fine in the Northern Rockies, compared to their brush with extinction in the 1970s. Their population has dipped slightly since its peak in 2011 to roughly 1,700 wolves, but biologists say it’s secure.

People have long assumed that fewer wolves lead to fewer depredations on sheep or cattle. And wildlife managers often say that lethal removal can be a salve for vitriol toward wolves, by providing a short-term solution for the harmed livestock producers, and by showing that states are actively managing the animals. It’s part of the reason some states allow wolf hunting, and why Washington, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming all lethally remove wolves that harm livestock. In 2013 the later three states killed 202 wolves for control purposes, or 8 percent of the population in all four states.

But when Wielgus and his coauthor looked at 25 years of data on lethal wolf control and livestock depredations from Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana they found that killing one wolf increases the odds of sheep depredation by 4 percent the following year. For cattle, it increased the odds by 5 to 6 percent.

This pattern holds until 25 percent of the wolf population is removed. That’s because wolf populations in the states studied grow at a 25 percent rate. So once the lethal removals exceed the population’s growth rate, wolves begin to decline, and so do depredations. But that’s not a sustainable solution for the wolves, or for people who don’t want to see them on the endangered species list.

These flagged fences called fladry are one nonlethal technique that livestock producers are using to deter wolves. Image courtesy of Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

It’s important to note that this study has found a correlation between wolf removal and livestock depredation over a large region, but it hasn’t established the exact reason for the patterns. To learn more about why lethal removal of wolves doesn’t appear to protect livestock, Wielgus now needs to drill down to individual packs.

Wielgus suspects the answer may be found in wolf social dynamics. The animals may compensate for losing part of their pack by increasing reproduction and thus, the need to hunt for those new pups. Or wolves may become less efficient hunters in smaller groups and turn to dining on livestock. “I think the take home point is that social behavior and social systems of these large carnivores, pack dynamics, territory, all of that is a very important element to how wolves interact with their environment,” says John Pierce, chief wildlife scientist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.“As we move forward in wolf management we should carefully be studying that and don’t assume a linear relationship (between wolf removal and depredation).”

Pierce thinks the study is too preliminary to change wolf management in the near future. But his agency is funding Wielgus to research proactive, non-lethal wolf management such as having cowboys called range riders monitoring for trouble, and using special fencing, or lights and sounds, to deter wolves. Wielgus is comparing the effectiveness of those techniques to lethal methods, and also mapping where livestock are at the greatest risk of wolf attack.

That work is still in its early stages, but Washington is starting to see good results with proactive non-lethal methods, says Pierce. Ideally, learning more about those techniques will help prevent events like what unfolded in northeastern Washington in August. The Huckleberry Pack became habituated to feeding on sheep, and after non-lethal wolf deterrents failed, a sharpshooter took out the alpha female (not the wolf they were hoping to eliminate) at the request of Washington’s wildlife department.

Wielgus hopes that his studies will help wildlife managers reevaluate practices that may be based on long-standing assumptions. “Science progresses,” he says, “and eventually we’ll get it right.”

Sarah Jane Keller is a correspondent for High Country News. She writes from Bozeman, Montana and tweets@sjanekeller. Homepage image of grey wolf being released into Yellowstone by Barry O'Neill, courtesy National Park Service,

]]>No publisherWildlifeU.S. Fish & WildlifeWolvesMontanaNew ResearchRanching2014/12/05 09:00:00 GMT-7ArticleLatest: Bison transferred to Fort Peck Indian Reservationhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.20/latest-bison-transferred-to-fort-peck-indian-reservation
Disease-free animals from Yellowstone get a new home.BACKSTORYYellowstone National Park’s nearly 5,000 wild bison have never hybridized with cattle and are among the nation’s few genetically pure bison. Tribes and conservationists have long wanted to use them to restore wild herds to the prairie, but ranchers vehemently objected, fearing they could infect cattle with brucellosis. In 2005, an experimental quarantine program was launched to certify disease-free bison – and perhaps make the establishment of new wild herds politically feasible.

FOLLOWUPIn mid-November, 139 brucellosis-free animals were transferred to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeast Montana. With bison from a 2012 transfer, Fort Peck’s herd of Yellowstone bison will now be almost 200 strong, the largest outside the park. The Fort Peck tribes aim to increase the herd to 1,000, the estimated number needed to restore their historic impact on the landscape. Unlike the 2012 transfer, which ranchers tried to stop in court, this relocation has attracted little vocal opposition, says Defenders of Wildlife’s Jonathan Proctor. “It shows the tremendous progress that’s been made.”

]]>No publisherLatestWildlifeTribesRanchingMontana2014/11/24 03:05:00 GMT-7ArticleLandscape-scale conservation gains groundhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/landscape-scale-conservation-gains-ground
The Nature Conservancy just announced its largest Washington land purchase to date. As the largest fires in Washington’s history consumed over 350,000 acres of forests last summer, the flames also lapped onto land the Nature Conservancy was considering for its largest-ever land purchase in the state. The conflagrations confirmed that they were making a sound decision. “We expect the frequency and intensity of fires to only increase, and we’ve seen such a tremendous shift in our fire regime in Washington, that we know we need to be motivated to find solutions,” says James Schroeder, the organization’s conservation director in eastern Washington.

Part of that solution coalesced late last month when the Conservancy announced its $134 million deal to buy 47,921 of Plum Creek Timber Company land in Washington’s Yakima River headwaters — an area the size of Tacoma — plus 117,152 acres in Western Montana’s Lower Blackfoot River Watershed. The purchase unites entire watersheds that have been under fractured ownership for generations. Having a cohesive plan for those lands will make it easier to do forest thinning or prescribed burns on a scale that could stave off catastrophic wildfires, for example. It should also make managing ecosystems to sustain at-risk species like spotted owls, grizzly bears or lynx less challenging.

A view over the Clearwater River and into land the Nature Conservancy is purchasing in Western Montana. Photo courtesy of The Nature Conservancy, by Steven Gnam

In addition to improving management options, the purchase marks a new era for those forests and the communities around them. The Plum Creek lands complicate management because they are interspersed with National Forest in a checkerboard pattern that formed in the 1860s, when Congress granted the railroads every other square mile section near their rail lines. As the checkerboard became more valuable to Plum Creek for real estate in the late 1990s and early 2000s, conservationists and communities grew nervous about losing forest access and being overrun with development. Groups like the Blackfoot Challenge and the Trust for Public Land in Montana, and the Nature Conservancy in both states, began buying the checkerboard to conserve it.

The recent deal was the final one needed to resolve 150 years of splintered ownership in Montana’s Blackfoot Valley. Now the Conservancy and its partners — other NGOs, community groups, the state and the Forest Service — can continue to look at common management goals. “We’ll be working on this for years,” says Chris Bryant, the Nature Conservancy’s land protection specialist for Western Montana. “This is a big piece of ground so it’s a slow, ongoing, almost glacial process.” Maintaining public access and biodiversity, and restoring logged parcels will be key to future plans.

The recent deal was the final purchase needed to resolve 150 years of splintered ownership in Montana’s Blackfoot Valley.

In Washington, especially, the Conservancy is also interested in trying different ways to thin forests for restoration, while selling timber when possible. That could help finance other restoration projections that don’t produce commercial timber. One way of doing that might be to create gaps in a former tree farm to emulate a more wild forest, while harvesting timber in the process. “For us this (purchase) is really a game changer,” says Schroeder. “A big piece of what we want to do is show that we can implement some science-based restoration on this landscape that could influence how national forests could be managed in the future.”

One benefit of the parcels' massive scale is that the Conservancy can act as a kind of test bed for ideas that are often too risky or cumbersome for the Forest Service, such as trying new techniques for making entire watersheds more resilient to climate change and fire.

The Conservancy’s latest big purchase ultimately signifies a move toward more landscape-scale thinking. For example,as much as the spotted owl has driven conservation in Washington’s forests, the traditional conservation idea of simply setting aside old-growth reserves isn’t enough. “If fire comes through and wipes out those reserves, the spotted owl is left with nothing. So if we can’t make the forests more resilient to fire and restore more habitat, then ultimately we will lose,” says Schroeder. “In changing climates, it’s not enough to have a small amount of land locked away. You need to figure out how to have enough flexibility on the land so that species can persist and move to different places and find suitable habitats. That’s an evolution in our way of thinking about conservation.”

Congress granted the railroads every other section of land near their rail lines in 1862. Now conservationists are trying to protect and reunite that land. Dark brown on the map indicates the Nature Conservancy's latest big purchase.

Sarah Jane Keller is a correspondent for High Country News. She writes from Bozeman, Montana and tweets @sjanekeller.

]]>No publisherNorthwestWashingtonMontanaForestsU.S. Forest ServicePublic Lands2014/11/15 05:05:00 GMT-7ArticleLatest: Montana judge rules groups of wells illegalhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.19/latest-montana-judge-rules-groups-of-wells-illegal
“Exempt well” laws in most Western states allow domestic wells to be drilled without water rights.BACKSTORY

“Exempt well” laws in most Western states allow domestic wells to be drilled without water rights, or even a permit in some cases (“Death by a thousand wells,” HCN, 10/19/09). These wells aren’t subject to cutbacks during drought, something that angers surface-water rights holders, who do have to cut back. Developers started exploiting exempt wells in fast-growing, water-short areas like the Gallatin Valley in Montana, which exempts wells that pump less than 35 gallons a minute and 10 acre-feet per year. Rather than drill one well that would serve a subdivision but exceed those limits, they drilled multiple exempt wells. Originally intended to support rural homesteads, the wells were assumed to be too small to impact streamflows — something that is now disputed.

FOLLOWUP

In mid-October, a Montana judge effectively closed that state’s loophole, ruling that grouping wells for single developments violates the law’s intent. He reinstated an older interpretation that will exempt future subdivisions only if all the wells collectively meet pumping limits. That rule will stand until a state agency or the Legislature comes up with a new one.

Schultz is one of just two large-scale bobcat farmers in North America. For 32 years, he and his wife, Carol, have raised the animals for fur in Arengard, North Dakota — population 115 — a dot on the state’s western border, just south of Williston. Schultz is an erstwhile trapper who hated to see skinned beavers go to waste and figured he could raise cats on the recycled meat. He sells his skins to Canadian auction houses, which ship the furs to Russia, China, Japan and Italy. A good fur, speckled with constellations of black spots against a snow-white belly, fetches him up to $1,100.

“I grew up on a farm, and we raised hogs and cattle and sheep and chickens,” Schultz, who currently keeps around 130 cats, told me earlier this week. “It’s always rewarding when you watch something go from little to big. It’s just a different kind of farming, is all it is.”

The last thing Schultz ever expected was international infamy. Yet infamy is what’s been thrust upon him, brought on by the confluence of an oil boom, an environmental review and a coalition of animal rights activists.

Arnegard sits at the heart of the Bakken region, the sprawling oil patch now yielding a million barrels of crude per day. When production in the Bakken spiked, so did truck traffic past the Schultz Fur Farm. Soon, as many as 25 semis were roaring by his property every hour, raising a racket and kicking up dust. The stressed-out bobcats responded by killing their offspring. (Although Schultz started his farm with wild-caught stock, today all his cats are born in captivity.) Forty percent of his kittens were slain by their mothers.

Schultz decided it was time to flee the Bakken and move to central Montana’s Fergus County, far from the tumult of the oil patch. On June 18 of this year, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (MFWP) completed a pro forma environmental assessment and recommended that Schultz receive a license to operate his relocated farm. The state then opened the assessment to a public comment period — and the fur hit the fan.

The comment period quickly turned into a referendum not on the environmental impacts of Larry Schultz’s bobcat farm, but on the ethics of farming animals for fur at all. Thousands of comments poured in, some from places as far away as New Zealand. A petition demanding the rejection of Schultz’s application garnered 12,000 signatures. The internet howled its disgust. One typical comment, on the website of the Missoula Independent: “This asshole wants to move because the mothers kill their young, basically it hurts his profits, f--- him.”

When activists from California called his house to castigate him, he tried to point out that the loss of animal life was inherent to anyfarming operation. They didn’t listen. “They can be an animal rights person, that’s their opinion, that’s fine,” Schultz told me. “Just like I can have an opinion about them being a vegetarian.”

Schulz’s predicament isn’t surprising: Fur farms have long been a favorite target of animal rights activists, and for good reason. Animals at many farms are confined to tiny, wire-floored cages; suffer from self-mutilation; and are sometimes killed via a shudder-inducing process called anal electrocution. (According to the environmental assessment, Schultz’s bobcats would be kept in 4x6 wire cages with attached 2x4 nesting boxes. He told me he kills his animals by lethal injection.)

Several countries, including the United Kingdom, have responded to pressure from animal rights campaigners by passing complete or partial bans on fur farming. The U.S., however, has no such law — to the outrage of many activists. This spring, ski mask-wearing vandals destroyed breeding records at a bobcat farm in Ronan, Montana, though their attempts to free the cats were deterred. “Our motives were borne of a fierce love for wildlife,” the activists wrote in an email. (Whether bobcats that have been raised in captivity for generations qualify as wildlife is a question the email did not address.)

Schultz hasn’t yet experienced that kind of harassment, but his attempts to depart the Bakken have brought his once-anonymous business an unwelcome notoriety. (When I asked him if he would speak with me, his first question was, “Well, that depends — do you eat a hamburger once in a while?”) Attacking bobcat farms, however, isn’t likely to put a dent in international demand for furs. As long as there’s a market, fur farming — and trapping, currently experiencing a boom of its own — will persist.

Meanwhile, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks has been sifting through the snowdrift of letters and emails (the comment period closed August 29), though according to game warden Shawn Briggs, there’s no timetable for issuing a decision on Schultz’s application. For now, then, Larry and Carol are stuck in the Bakken. “We’re in the heart of it,” Schultz said. “We could stay and bitch about it. Or we could leave.”

]]>No publisherAgricultureEconomyNorth DakotaMontanaOilWildlife2014/09/11 10:00:00 GMT-6ArticleWant a trophy buck? Ditch the camo and get a guidehttp://www.hcn.org/articles/want-a-trophy-buck-ditch-the-camo-and-get-a-guide
Study looks at successful types of big game huntersWith hunting seasons opening around the Western U.S. and Canada, two researchers from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, have some advice for sportsmen looking to bag a trophy elk or deer this fall: Quit the workout, ditch the camo and pony up for a guide.

A study of successful hunters, published this August in the peer-reviewed online journal PLOSONE, found that “only the presence of guides increased the odds of killing larger prey.” Age, personal fitness and the use of camouflage apparel made little difference in taking down a trophy.

The study examined roughly 4,300 online photos of men from western Canadian outdoors forums and outfitter websites, using evident physical characteristics – such as graying hair and paunchy bellies – to determine relative age and fitness. The methods limited the information the researchers could collect, but also guarded against hunters’ habits of exaggeration when it comes to talking up exploits.

Though the study only addresses big-game trophy hunters, it does suggest that while humans have staked themselves atop the food chain as “super-predators,” we’re not using typical adaptations of other species, such as fitness, strength, or stealth, to successfully hunt prey. And while other animals may guard knowledge of bountiful hunting grounds as a specialized advantage among individuals, in the case of humans and paid guides, there’s a strong (read: financial) incentive to share information with others. North American hunters “have overcome many of the physical, but not knowledge-based, challenges of hunting,” according to the authors.

Perhaps the most surprising finding is the futility of camouflage – at least for big game. “Even though 80 percent of the hunters that we found were wearing camouflage clothing, they weren’t any more likely to be posing with a trophy animal than those without camouflage clothing,” Child says. “It didn’t make a difference, and being physically fit didn’t increase a hunter’s chance of getting a trophy animal (either).”

Even though the study suggests that outfitter expertise is the best way to bag game, a quick look at guide numbers in Western states and at gear sales at key retailers suggests that many people don’t quite realize this.

In Wyoming, the number of licensed hunting outfitters dipped to its lowest mark in 25 years in 2013 (332 compared with a high of 382 outfitters in 1991 and 1992), but that fluctuation isn’t far from the average and may reflect post-recession impacts on trips for out-of-state hunters. Success rates for client deer hunters have hovered around 70 percent or greater, based on figures from the state Board of Outfitters and Professional Guides.

Montana has about 300 active hunting guides, many of whom are aging and “looking for an exit and retirement strategy,” as overall hunting numbers decline, says Mac Minard, executive director of the Montana Outfitters and Guides Association. For those guides that remain, high-end, trophy hunting trips are the most in demand. “I think people have less time, and perhaps less skills and less interest, I suppose, and they’re willing to spend more money for a high-quality experience,” Minard says.

Meanwhile, rapidly expanding big-box outdoors retailers, including Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shops and Sportsman’s Warehouse, all heavily market camo – and its benefits – for trophy hunters and other big-game seekers. If the clothing isn’t working in the field, it’s certainly not affecting their sales. Nebraska-based Cabela’s, known for its in-store mountains seeded with taxidermied wildlife, generates about $3 billion in annual revenue and operates 59 stores, with plans for steady growth of 13 to 15 new openings per year. Bass Pro Shops, headquartered in Missouri, is also aggressively expanding, building 20 new stores by 2015; an increase in locations by more than a third. The recent opening of a Cabela’s megastore in north Denver was also credited with boosting local sales taxes and attracting other retailers to a new shopping area.

Cabela’s even offers its own exclusive, temperature-activated ColorPhase camo clothing, which can morph from brown to green to help hunters stay cloaked on sunny or cloudy days, in spring or fall. That may look and sound cool, but it won’t provide an edge for hunters, at least according to Child and Darimont. So sportsmen may want to hold off on buying that $80 insulated hoodie – and instead offer their guide an extra-fat tip.

Joshua Zaffos is a contributing editor at High Country News. Follow @jzaffos

]]>No publisherRecreationWildlifeMontanaWyomingCanadaHunting2014/09/03 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleClosure of federal sheep facility would be a victory for grizzlieshttp://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/closure-of-federal-sheep-facility-would-be-a-victory-for-grizzlies
On the last day of August, 2012, a collared grizzly bear dubbed 726 by federal wildlife biologists vanished into the rugged Centennial Mountains on the Idaho-Montana border. A few weeks later, they recovered his collar near an established campsite. It appeared to have been cut, stoking suspicions that hunters may have shot the bear, a federally protected species, then hidden its carcass to avoid prosecution. Some environmental groups floated a more sinister theory (followed this June with a lawsuit), that the bear had been offed by a shepherd defending a flock that belonged not to a rancher, but to a federal institution: The Agricultural Research Service’s U.S. Sheep Experiment Station.

Today, despite investigators’ best efforts, the bear’s fate remains unknown. But its presence in those mountains underscores their importance as a wildlife highway between the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and pristine chunks of habitat to the west and north in Idaho and Montana (the mountains are within the “High Divide,” #2 on this map), particularly for Yellowstone’s expanding populations of grizzlies and wolves. Livestock don’t mix well with hungry predators; once a bear has learned how easy it is to take down a sheep or six, it’s likely to come back for more, and wildlife managers must kill it.

Environmental groups like the National Wildlife Federation have long worked with federal agencies and ranchers to head off such conflicts, negotiating the removal of livestock from more than 600,000 acres of federal land around Yellowstone. The Sheep Experiment Station, which grazes sheep on tens of thousands of acres in the Centennials, is something of a last holdout – and as I reported early in 2012, is pretty much working at cross purposes with the stated grizzly recovery goals of the Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and others.

The grizzly bear population in and around Yellowstone National Park has grown robust enough that the animals are dispersing outwards via habitat corridors like the one provided by the Centennial Mountains.

This summer, though, it’s begun to look as if the century-old institution might finally shut its doors – not for environmental reasons, but for financial ones. “A prolonged period of declining and flat budgets has resulted in underfunded programs at the (station),” Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack wrote in a letter this June, informing a Congressional appropriations subcommittee of the USDA’s plans to reassign the facility’s budget and employees. “The unit no longer has the critical mass of scientists necessary to address high priority research.”----

It’s a major, if indirect, victory for wildlife, says Tom France, NWF’s Northern Rockies senior director of Western wildlife conservation. “In some ways, this may be the reverse of an experience you had growing up – where there was a vacant lot or a woodland where you played, that someone later came and built houses on.”

Under the closure, much of the station’s nearly $2 million budget will be transferred to other Idaho research facilities, and its genetics research program would go to another federal sheep research facility in Nebraska. But Agricultural Research Service spokeswoman Sandy Miller Hays was uncertain what would happen to its rangeland-related research. Such projects are a key part of why the sheep industry is stumping for the facility to stay open: Without access to high desert and mountain environments where Western ranchers actually run sheep, supporters argue, researchers can’t test specialized breeds or ways to improve grazing practices to protect sensitive habitats and species. And the loss of its largest employer (17 people would be reassigned) would be a major blow to rural Dubois, Idaho.

It didn’t take long for Idaho and Montana’s congressional delegations, along with a couple of conservative lawmakers from Washington and Oregon, to throw their weight behind the station with their own letter in July. Notably, all are Republicans that have in the past attacked federal budgets as being too bloated. In response, the research service held listening sessions and gathered public comments through last Thursday, and will report back to Congress with its findings.

Until then, the station’s fate will likely be as murky as bear 726’s. But “unless Idaho’s congressional delegation passes a rider on some bill that keeps it open,” France says, “it’s not a matter of if it closes, but of when.”

]]>No publisherWildlifeBearsMontanaAgricultureIdahoBureau of Land ManagementU.S. Forest ServiceNational Park ServiceWashingtonOregonPolitics2014/08/20 05:05:00 GMT-6ArticleThe roads scholarhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.13/the-roads-scholar
An ecologist helps wildlife safely cross highways. In the orange Montana twilight, Marcel Huijser paces a bridge spanning U.S. Route 93, trying to think like a bear. This graceful arc, surfaced not with pavement but with soil and shin-high grasses, is a triumph of conservation engineering: Built by the Montana Department of Transportation in collaboration with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the bridge is one of 41 crossing structures in a 56-mile stretch of highway that help animals from moose to mountain lions safely traverse the road.

Yet Huijser, an ecologist who studies wildlife crossings, can't help but imagine ways to improve it. The grass, for example, fails to block the headlights of the Missoula-bound traffic 26 feet below. Huijser's remote cameras once captured a black bear fleeing from an approaching car's glare. "A visual screen would be helpful," he says, thoughtfully stroking the grizzled beard that covers his lean face. "It could just be a wooden fence."

To most people, roads connote progress. But Huijser sees asphalt as a challenge to surmount. One minute he's pointing out brush piles that allow rodents to navigate the overpass, and the next he's describing his vision for modular bridges that can be relocated to accommodate new migration routes as climate change pushes species northward.

Huijser's passion derives from his native Netherlands, where infrastructure is both a threat to wildlife and a tool for conservation. In the Netherlands – a country that has just one-ninth the landmass of Montana, and almost 17 times as many people – preserving wildlife has become an urgent, and necessarily urban, task. The nation boasts over 600 wildlife crossings, including the world's largest, the half-mile long Natuurbrug Zanderij Crailoo, which spans a railway, a sports complex and a business park.

Road ecology was an obvious choice when Huijser sought a wildlife research focus in the '90s in the Netherlands. In a place where bears and wolves have been extinct for centuries, that meant sweating the small stuff: specifically Erinaceus europaeus, the European hedgehog, dying by the hundreds of thousands on Dutch roads. Huijser's research revealed that planners could prevent hog-kill by building crossings at hedgehogs' favorite territory: the margins between forests and grasslands. "One of my statements during my Ph.D. defense was that they're really edgehogs," he says, sheepish at the pun.

In 1998, at a Florida conference on – what else? – road ecology, Huijser met Bethanie Walder, now his wife and, until recently, public lands director for a New Mexico-based conservation group, WildEarth Guardians. In 2002, he relocated to Missoula for a job with Montana State University's Western Transportation Institute (WTI) and discovered that U.S. agencies had different priorities than European ones – primarily reducing collisions with the large, common animals that frequently damage cars and injure people.

That's important, of course: Huijser has shown that wildlife crossings often pay for themselves by reducing crash expenses. But the focus on collisions often neglects the needs of small or rare species. Because deer use underpasses while grizzlies prefer overpasses, for instance, an ungulate-centric approach doesn't help threatened bears. "If you took a conservation perspective," Huijser explains, "you'd design structures of different type, dimensions and location."

The U.S. 93 project takes such a perspective – thanks largely to the tribes, whose legal muscle and concern for wildlife led to crossings being incorporated in state plans to widen the highway through the Flathead Indian Reservation. Huijser's camera-traps and track beds – groomed swaths of dirt that reveal hoof- and paw-prints – suggest the efforts are working. At least 20 different species have used the crossings, including bobcats, badgers and grizzlies. What's more, the structures have reduced crashes by at least 50 percent, suggesting that conservation and safety are compatible goals.

"That research is being used to justify projects across the West, around the country, and internationally," says Rob Ament, WTI's road ecology program manager. Huijser has consulted on Chinese and Mongolian highways, and last year published a study suggesting that Brazil (where he'll teach this fall) could profit from crossings for capybaras, enormous rodents that roam in herds and cause traffic fatalities.

Yet while he calls his cost-benefit studies his most important work, finance isn't his primary motivation. "We have to consider what it's worth to have animals on the landscape," Huijser says. "That hasn't been part of our economic analyses. But our well-being depends on having wildlife around us."

This story was funded by the Solutions Journalism Network.

]]>No publisherWildlifeU.S. Fish & WildlifeMontanaTransportationPoliticsProfiles2014/08/13 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleClimate changes for wolverine listinghttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.13/climate-changes-for-wolverine-listing
What good can the Endangered Species Act do in a warming world? Updated 8/6/14

In the dead of winter, female wolverines dig elaborate, multi-chambered dens to raise their young, choosing sites where snowpack lasts well into the spring. But snowpack in the Northern Rockies is almost certain to decline as the climate warms, jeopardizing their chances for successful reproduction. There are fewer than 300 wolverines in the Lower 48, and models show that they could lose 31 percent of their habitat by 2045 and 63 percent by 2085. And so, in February 2013, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed adding the "mountain devils" to the endangered species list.

The science behind the proposal has not changed, but the agency's position on it has. Mountain-Prairie Regional Director Noreen Walsh advocated against a speculative listing in a memo released by environmentalists in July, citing uncertainty as to exactly why wolverines need a persistent snowpack to reproduce and how its loss would harm the animals. Though scientists recommended listing wolverines as threatened, agency leader Dan Ashe defended her position – a strong indication of which way the final decision, due in early August, will go.

Wolverines would have been the first species in the Lower 48 thrust onto the endangered species list by climate change. A listing would have helped validate the use of climate models to develop strategies to protect animals against future threats. And it would have been unusual because, unlike most of the species the act safeguards, wolverines, though rare, are not thought to be declining.

Idaho, Montana and Wyoming – the states that anchor the animal's range in the Lower 48 – dreaded the prospect of a listing and the public-land restrictions it could bring, while environmentalists cheered it on. In practical terms, though, would formal protections really help wolverines? Can a law that was designed to rescue species from discrete, localized threats also protect them from the more diffuse hazards of a warming world?

The Endangered Species Act has helped prevent the extinction of many species of plants and animals by removing specific threats to their survival, often only in areas designated as "critical habitat." Closing forest roads in prime grizzly habitat, for instance, helped keep poachers and stressful traffic at bay. Prohibiting the hunting or poisoning of wolves after they were reintroduced to the Northern Rockies allowed populations to rebuild. Restricting timber harvests in the Pacific Northwest took pressure off the northern spotted owl.

But the Fish and Wildlife Service can't simply rope off high mountain niches, exclude greenhouse gases and preserve the snow that wolverines depend on. Polar bears, bearded seals and ringed seals are already listed due to disappearing sea ice, yet carbon emissions continue to rise, and the Arctic is still melting.

The Center for Biological Diversity, which has sued for greater wolverine protection, wants the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to include specific emissions targets in the plans they create to recover species threatened by climate change "to raise awareness about what these species need," says Shaye Wolf, the center's climate science director. But using the act to reduce greenhouse gases would be politically and practically impossible, argues J.B. Ruhl, a Vanderbilt University professor specializing in endangered species law. Scientists couldn't prove that a particular coal-fired power plant is responsible for the demise of polar bears, for instance. Plus, the idea has never had support in the agencies or the White House.

Still, listing species threatened by climate change isn't pointless. Recovery plans lead to basic conservation measures, such as long-term, range-wide monitoring of endangered populations and their habitats. Such unglamorous science is crucial to understanding what can be done to help at-risk species; it's not being done for wolverines, which are elusive and scarce, thus difficult and expensive to study. Insufficient funding for wolverine research also means that any decline in the population or devastating habitat changes might not be noticed until it's too late.

Additionally, the act includes an allowance for the introduction of "experimental" populations, which carry fewer land-use restrictions than existing populations that are declared endangered or threatened. In Colorado, wildlife managers have discussed introducing an experimental wolverine population for years. Trapping and poisoning wiped out wolverines in Colorado in the early 20th century, but its mountains could provide a snowy stronghold into the future. Now, however, the state is reluctant to reintroduce a species that could later become officially endangered.

Though few species have been listed primarily because of impending climate change, 66 percent of recovery plans now recommend action to cushion the impacts of warming. Of those, about 17 percent mention reducing greenhouse gas emissions, about half recommend monitoring, and most suggest actions to help species adapt, according to Wolf. These are incremental steps, but necessary to maintain the act's relevance in a warming world.

In the future, the Fish and Wildlife Service could take more creative approaches, like setting aside critical habitat that may not be ideal today, but could be essential tomorrow. Another option is to protect corridors that would allow species to move to friendlier climes as their current homes become less hospitable. The Endangered Species Act, explains Ruhl, hasn't solved traditional problems such as urban sprawl or invasive species – but it's helped species survive them. Similarly, the act must be used to address the effects, if not the causes, of a warming planet. "I think fundamentally this is about trying to help species to adapt to climate change," he says. "That's what the Endangered Species Act can help us do best."